About BoxLambda
BoxLambda is a project creating a retro-style FPGA-based microcomputer from open-source components. The microcomputer serves as a platform for software and RTL experimentation.
BoxLambda is a software-hardware cross-over project. The plan is to provide room for experimentation both on the FPGA RTL side and on the software side.
Key Goals
- Create a sandbox for experimenting with software and (FPGA) HW.
- Simplicity: It should be easy to jump in and do something: create, hack, tinker.
- It should be doable for a single person to develop a good understanding of the entire system, software and hardware.
- Deterministic Behavior: By design, it should be clear how long an operation, be it an instruction or a DMA transfer, is going to take.
- Single User/Single Tasking OS booting to a console shell.
- Create a Modular Architecture allowing for a mix-and-match of software and hardware components.
- Support for partial FPGA reconfiguration.
- Simplicity: It should be easy to jump in and do something: create, hack, tinker.
- Target Hardware is Digilent’s Arty-A7.
- The computer should support the following peripherals:
- Keyboard
- Mouse (optional)
- Joystick (optional)
- Serial port
- SD card storage
- VGA Display
- Audio output
- Sound and graphics should be sufficient to support retro-style 2D gameplay.
You can find the source code for BoxLambda on GitHub: https://github.com/epsilon537/boxlambda/.